Hello all,
Just wondering if anyone has hit this before. I'm doing a new install. I'm chrooted in...doing emerge sync...and it scrolls lots of text by...and after a bit...just freezes. Keyboard is locked...nothing.

I had to cycle the box with the power switch...booted back up..chrooted again...started emerge sync..and it locked up again..at a different place...this time locked at part listing
games-board/knights/knights-0.6.ebuild.

Any ideas on this? Fans seem to be running fine..doesn't seem overly hot.

I can't use the keyboard at all...so, can't get into another term session on the box...

This is my first sparc install...not sure what to do next.

TIA,

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

The only weird thing that happened was when setting up the partitions..it didn't seem to want to default right on the start partition after one partition had already been set..I had to look at the end...and add one manually..then it worked just fine. I just figured that was how fdisk worked on Sun or scsi.

Guess it is time to look elsewhere. You state you boot with gentoo-smp. Have you tried the uni-processor kernel?

Nope...I can give that a try. Are people not able to use both processors on these things?

I was wondering at first if I didn't have enough swap space..I'd run into that before..but, last time I tried emerge sync...I ssh'ed into the box while it was running...and with 1G of memory...it never seemed to ever use the swap..so, I ruled that out.

Will try with single processor kernel...

C_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

I'm doing a new install. I'm chrooted in...doing emerge sync...and it scrolls lots of text by...and after a bit...just freezes. Keyboard is locked...nothing.

Are you absolutely sure it's locked up and not just dog-ass slow? Try it again and press Alt-F2 while it appears frozen to see if you can get a new terminal session.

I'm in the process of my first Gentoo install on an Ultra 5 and "emerge sync" kept timing out (I think the default is something like 3mins) pretty much exactly as you describe. It never actually locked up solid, though. It would eventually fall through to a failure message (after going through its 3 retries). Just conjecture since I haven't done it yet, but if the problem is that rsync is giving up before the processor has finished with a package an obvious thing to try would be increasing the timeout period.

I've been doing an "emerge-webrsync" since this afternoon -- going on 8-9 hrs at this point -- and it's also pausing for a long time on certain packages, but there's no timeout to worry about doing it that way.

I'm doing a new install. I'm chrooted in...doing emerge sync...and it scrolls lots of text by...and after a bit...just freezes. Keyboard is locked...nothing.

Are you absolutely sure it's locked up and not just dog-ass slow? Try it again and press Alt-F2 while it appears frozen to see if you can get a new terminal session.

I'm in the process of my first Gentoo install on an Ultra 5 and "emerge sync" kept timing out (I think the default is something like 3mins) pretty much exactly as you describe. It never actually locked up solid, though. It would eventually fall through to a failure message (after going through its 3 retries). Just conjecture since I haven't done it yet, but if the problem is that rsync is giving up before the processor has finished with a package an obvious thing to try would be increasing the timeout period.

I've been doing an "emerge-webrsync" since this afternoon -- going on 8-9 hrs at this point -- and it's also pausing for a long time on certain packages, but there's no timeout to worry about doing it that way.

Thanks for the reply. I'm thinking it is stuck. The keyboard freezes, so, no way to get into another terminal session.

How does one change the timeout on rsync? I'd like to give this a chance before I try to install with the older LiveCD I just downloaded.

Dunno if this has anything to do with it, but, my CFLAGS="-O3 -mcpu=ultrasparc -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="sparc-linux-unknown-gnu"

Anyway, if I can find out how to change the timeout on the rsync...I'll give that a try...

EDIT: Decided to try emerge-webrsync I fire it off...just sits there with the"Fetching most recent snapshot", and a flashing prompt...but, doesn't look like any action whatsoever. Been sitting there doing that for tha past hour almost.

I noticed the the make.conf file was really sparse on this install..basicaly only had CFLAGS, CHOST and about 4 others...the only other thing was all the ftp sites I set with mirrorselect to put the mirrors on for download...on all other installs..at least there were a bunch of variables listed that you could uncomment and set...is this normal?

Thanks,

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

Just a follow up...I tried emerge-webrsync....and it just stayed at the prompt. I cam in 2 hours later...hit shift to turn the monitor back on...and it appeared the system was locked up again.

Could this be a hardware (overheating) problem? I think I've left the root prompt from booting up from gentoo cd up this long...with no spontaneous lockups...and even when it had solaris on it...don't think it locked up either with being on for a few hours.

I'm running out of ideas here.

I have the gentoo sparc64 1.4_r5 cd I've burned...about to try that and see how it goes.

Any thoughts appreciated!

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

It's quite possible it's a hardware issue. I have a similar setup, Ultra 2, 2x300 MHz procs, 384MB RAM, Creator3D and 2x18 GB drives, and emerge sync works fine here. Normally it's a bit hard for me to get it to lock up, when I'm not running really experimental stuff.

It's quite possible it's a hardware issue. I have a similar setup, Ultra 2, 2x300 MHz procs, 384MB RAM, Creator3D and 2x18 GB drives, and emerge sync works fine here. Normally it's a bit hard for me to get it to lock up, when I'm not running really experimental stuff.

Thanks for the reply!! Ok...tried doing it from the 1.4_r5 iso...it seemed to be screaming through the emerge sync...got to the part where it said Updating Portage Cache with the spinning cursor...locked up tight...but, machine had not been on very long at all...so, I can't imagine it had been hot...it had been off for a couple hours.

I'm so new to sparc..these are my first ones..can anybody give me some links or insight as to what to look for in case it is hardware?

I've got another almost identical ultra2 dual 300 I bought...only 500M ram and not a 3D creator..just regular. May switch them and try install on it....will let you know if that goes any better.

Other than that...if it is hardware...any info would be greatly appreciated!!

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

An update: I'm puzzled. I've just booted up into the Live CD..got network connection...started sshd. I've opened up another session on the box..running top on one of them..trying to give it a little load but, not chrooting and doing the emerge sync or emerge-webrsync.

I was seeing if it would just lock up on its own...to try to narrow it down to see if it was overheating or something. It has been running fine for about 2+ hours at this time. Responsive...no problems.

So..I don't know where to go from here. Someone mentioned it might be some kind of timeout with emerge sync...how/where would I check/change this? I looked in the docs..don't see anything about a timeout factor.

I'm stuck bad...was hoping to have this up as a webserver this weekend...

Any more suggestions out there?

c_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

Someone mentioned it might be some kind of timeout with emerge sync...how/where would I check/change this? I looked in the docs..don't see anything about a timeout factor.

I haven't changed mine yet to test, but the RSYNC_TIMEOUT setting in /etc/make.conf is what I was thinking of. It's commented out near the bottom of the default make.conf file. It just takes an integer value representing the number of seconds to wait before timing out:

RSYNC_TIMEOUT=180

At some point, I'm going to try jacking it up to more like 300-600 seconds to see if it makes any appreciable difference in my sync success rate.

I am at my wit's freakin' end here...stupid POS will NOT update. I tried emerge-webrsync...let it go..opened another term...it finally started loading a snapshot...got to the part where it said Syncing local tree...

And WHAM....locks up solid again. Can alt-f2 to other term to watch top...no keyboard reaction...and when I ping it from another box..it gives host unreachable...

I just don't have a clue as to what to do next...eveything seems to work to a point...I've left it on....and all works, so, can't be heating problems. Only locks when I try emerge sync or emerge-webrsync.

Any possible ideas on what to do besides shoot this thing....

Thanks in advance...

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

It's quite possible it's a hardware issue. I have a similar setup, Ultra 2, 2x300 MHz procs, 384MB RAM, Creator3D and 2x18 GB drives, and emerge sync works fine here. Normally it's a bit hard for me to get it to lock up, when I'm not running really experimental stuff.

Ok, I'm back on trying to get this box past the original emerge sync. I've swapped out the RAM (1G) for totally new, sun branded ram. I've swapped out the Fujitsu harddrives. Started from scratch.

Thing still locks up on me cold.

I was able to put together another Ultra2, not a 3d, but, a normal creator, with half the ram, none of these problems.

I'm at my wits end, can someone please help me out here. Only things left to swap out are the mother board and processors...but, that's gotta be overkill, eh??

I'll try to add the rsync setting in my make.conf...but, dunno if that will work. When I emerge sync...it connects quite fast...and the text just starts flying past the screen......then, just stops...and keyboard locks up cold. Can't alt-f2 into another session...ssh doesn't respond.

I'm baffled...

cayenne _________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

Well from what you've done it sounds like the most likely problem now is your scsi controller/bus. If you have a sbus scsi card and some external disk try doing an install on that. If you don't have any spare cards or disk you could also try putting portage onto a tmpfs and try syncing. Just mount say a 512M tmpfs onto /usr/portage. Obviously this isn't permanant, but only for testing purposes. This should help narrow the problem down even more.

Well from what you've done it sounds like the most likely problem now is your scsi controller/bus. If you have a sbus scsi card and some external disk try doing an install on that. If you don't have any spare cards or disk you could also try putting portage onto a tmpfs and try syncing. Just mount say a 512M tmpfs onto /usr/portage. Obviously this isn't permanant, but only for testing purposes. This should help narrow the problem down even more.

I should add that this problem was just experienced by me yesterday evening while doing an `emerge sync` on an Ultra 10/440MHz 512M (no scsi controller nor drives). I installed from the 2004.0 universal disk and did a stage1 build successfully a few weeks ago. Still have non-stop problems (no video, can't mount root, etc) with newly built kernels other than that supplied on the 2004.0 cd (2.4.24-r2). However, the system seems to be functioning normally.

That is until yesterday, when the system hard froze about 3 minutes after starting an 'emerge sync`. This was the only occurrence and subsequent attempts have been successful.

Similar symptoms as above. Thus, I would suggest not looking quite so hard at the SCSI subsystem as a probable culprit.

Thanks for the replies...I"m not sure what the deal on this box is. I've successfully put this on another Ultra2 box..only a couple of differences..it is not a 3d creatror...only 512 M Ram...and IBM drives instead of Fujitsu.

I did notice, that the install guide for sparc has changed since I started this, and it says things like "don't put /boot on a separate partition, and the the entire / directory has to be on the first partition less than 2G"??

I've put this box away for awhile. Came back to it. Thinking maybe putting the whole /var dir on the 2nd disk might be making it pick. So, on the 2nd drive just put /home and /var/www with /var still being on the root partition on disk one.

Emerge sync...still locks up...

Anyone have any new ideas?

TIA,

cayenne_________________Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........